Last month Microsoft announced its initiative to bring a range of affordable VR devices to Windows 10. There's going to be a whole bunch of headsets created in conjunction with a number of VR manufacturers, including Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP and Lenovo. In theory this means offering VR experiences for all. Widespread adoption is going to hinge on how demanding the experience is, however. Here's the official minimum specs for Windows 10 VR so you can see just what is required.

Compared to the competition, these are unbelievably low system requirements. This is really scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to hardware, aside from the 8GB system memory. Windows 10 VR apparently only requires a 2.5 GHz dual core mobile processor, hinting that Microsoft is aiming at laptop users for its VR push, rather than high-end gamers.

We’ve talked before about the possibly of Nvidia and AMD releasing graphics card exclusive content, but how about CPU exclusivity? Vertigo Games, developer of VR zombie slasher Arizona Sunshine, did just that, at least for a brief while. Features of the game were locked depending on whether or not players had the Intel Core i7 “[Vertigo] have recommended”. Evidently seeing the error of its ways, Vertigo Games has swiftly removed the requirement and issued a statement.

The locked content in question was both a Horde Mode and an extra challenging Apocalyptic Mode difficulty setting. It’s understandable for these modes to perhaps be more demanding, but it’s another thing entirely to prevent users without specific hardware from running it at all.

The never-ending Tales series is back next month with Tales of Berseria, an epic journey of self discovery for Velvet. She's the first chief protagonist from the long-running franchise to be female, to the best of my knowledge, and she's harboring extreme hatred due to events which took place prior to the game. It's textbook JRPG stuff, no doubt offering up more than 100 hours of gameplay as players explore the many islands of Midgand. Here's the full system requirements for Tales of Berseria so you can make sure you're ready for its January 26th launch.

Apart from a few outliers like Final Fantasy XV, the majority of JRPG's are stuck in a bit of time warp with visuals that wouldn't look out of place on a PS3. That's because the vast majority of Japanese gamers are still waiting to upgrade to the PlayStation 4. What you end up with are games such as Tales of Berseria which are still made with Sony's decade old console in mind.

A pair of currently unannounced AMD Polaris GPUs have surfaced in the HEX data for a recent MacOS driver update. Examining the registry, it appears as if AMD has Polaris 10 XT2 and Polaris 12 GPUs in the works.

In the excerpt below you can see all of the current-gen AMD Radeon chips listed out, including Polaris 10 (RX 480, RX 470), Polaris 11 (RX 460), the upcoming Vega 10, and these Polaris 10 XT2 and Polaris 12 chips.

AMD’s impressive march back into relevance continues with the revelation that Team Red has allegedly signed a deal with Intel to incorporate AMD Radeon GPUs into Intel’s next-generation processors.

Yep, you read that right. After years of Intel attempting to make gains with its own integrated GPUs (iGPUs), the chip giant has thrown the towel in and decided to leave it to the graphics hardware experts. A contract has already reportedly been signed that will see AMD iGPU on future Intel CPUs.

The Intel Core i7-7700K is clocked higher right out of the box, running with 4.2 GHz base clock and 4.5 GHz boost clock. That’s moderately faster than the 4.0GHz base, 4.2 GHz boost on the i7-6700K. As a result, in the series of benchmark tests performed by Chinese site EXP Review, the Intel Core i7-7700K came out unanimously on top. It was 7.4% faster at single-threaded performance and 8.88% faster during multi-threaded benchmarks.

What could well be the first ever gaming benchmark for the AMD Radeon RX 490 has popped up in the Ashes of the Singularity benchmark database, suggesting the Radeon RX 490 could be at least on par with a premium GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card.

A benchmark result from a user called Ceaj has been performed using an unnamed graphics card, codenamed 687F:C1. It pulls in a total score of 8,400 in Ashes of the Singularity’s DirectX 12 benchmark, making it the 131st highest score of all time. This puts the RX 490 right in the mix with high-end GTX 1080’s. The score has since been deleted, suggesting whoever was responsible for the snafu has whipped it off in the hope nobody noticed.

Having gained quite a bit of experience in the motherboard and graphics card markets over the years, MSI has used its knowledge to craft its own premium CPU cooler. Utilising technology learned from GPU cooling, the MSI Core Frozr L CPU Cooler is hefty brute of a cooler. It’s a tower cooler which stands vertically off your motherboard. Keeping it cool it’s packing quad 8mm heatpipes, a 120mm fan and a nickel coated copper base.

The first retail listing for the Radeon RX 490 has popped up, as well as what appear to be the first ever benchmarks for the Radeon Pro 490. Yes, the Radeon Pro 490. It looks as if this is an entirely different graphics card aimed at the professional and Mac market. Initial 3DMark performance suggests the Radeon Pro 490 is capable of running faster than NVidia’s GeForce GTX 1070, offering as much as 13.2% higher scores.